[Editor’s note: Spoilers for “Monkey Man” below.]
Move over John Wick, there’s a new martial arts action hero: Dev Patel’s titular underdog in his directorial debut, “Monkey Man.” Inspired by the ancient legend of the Hindu deity Hanuman, the invincible Monkey God, Patel creates his own mythic avenging angel in the tradition of such Korean action films as “Oldboy” and “Man From Nowhere.” Lowly yet scrappy and full of rage, Patel’s Kid is determined to take down the sinister elite of the fictional Yatana, Mumbai’s version of Gotham, and kill the corrupt cop, Rana (Sikandar Kher), who brutally murdered his mother and scarred him for life.
Patel (a martial arts competitor and teacher in London in the early 2000s with a passion for the film genre), trained rigorously with fight coordinator Brahim Chab (“The Foreigner”) and performed all the fights himself. Although he embraced Chab’s intricate choreography, he also had his own ideas about presenting Kid as an underdog street fighter and shooting long takes with cinematographer Sharone Meir during some of the key action sequences in the swanky Kings Club and brothel.
“When I first got involved, I really didn’t believe he was going to be able to pull it off because there was so much fight action to be done,” Chab told IndieWire. “But, to his credit, during the fight scenes, Dev was probably the hardest-working director, actor, and producer I ever worked with. With all that training and action, it took a toll on his body. He broke his hand, he broke his toes, he fractured his shoulder.”
Kid starts off throwing fights as a human punching bag — wearing a monkey mask and called “The Beast” — in a dingy underground fight club run by emcee Tiger (Sharlto Copley). “We wanted to make sure the audience felt a little bit of disgust with the place,” added Chab. “But once he gets more skilled as a martial artist, then we go with longer pieces of choreography without saying cut. Dev wanted to be an underdog to get revenge for his family. It was also important that he be vulnerable because this was about survival. He didn’t want to be a one-man army going through everybody without injuries.”
As a street fighter, Kid uses every object he can find and resorts to clawing and biting when necessary. The first big fight was in the Kings Club bathroom with Rana, highlighted by an exploding aquarium. “It was very difficult in the bathroom because we didn’t have a lot of space, and the aquarium became an obstacle with water on the floor,” Chab said. “It was horrible for Dev because he had to crawl and he got an eye infection. We had mirrors as well, and he broke his hand during that fight. But we didn’t want it too choreographed. At first, I made it too clean and Dev told me to make it more like a brawl with a lot of grappling and face pushing.”
That’s just round one, which Rana wins. After escaping and hiding out and training, Kid returns for a rematch in Kings Club but the obstacles are much greater. Like Bruce Lee in “Game of Death,” Kid skillfully battles his way up the social strata of each floor (with some assistance when fighting an army of bodyguards in the VIP Room) to get to Rana. “Dev wanted a fight escalation with the whole club structure,” added Chab. “We shot it at the end of production, so Dev and everybody were very exhausted already. He had surgery on his hand, so he was limited to fighting with one hand, and he broke his toe by then.”
The kitchen fight was supposed to be divided into 20 or so cuts, but Patel instead chose two very long takes. A fight with a swinging axe in the brothel had many different angles, and there was a handoff from one camera operator to another to get around a piece of the set without stopping. However, the elevator fight offered a creative way of handling knives. “I was thinking how to make this a bit unique, like something we’ve never seen before,” continued Chab. “I like the idea of stabbing someone in the leg and then fighting with the other knife with someone else, and then grabbing the knife that you stabbed the first guy with and using it again.
“When we were thinking of cool ways to stab people to finish them off, Dev was like, ‘How about if I use my mouth and just stab him in the neck?’ We gave it a try and shot it a couple of times. It looked great. Also, there are no cuts in the elevator. It plays as one shot. At first, we were thinking to shoot it in sections, but we didn’t have time. We only had four hours to shoot that fight and we just kept the camera rolling.”
The VIP Room fight took three days during the pandemic, recycling a team of 10 stunt guys with makeup giving them different looks, and shot with one camera to see how far they could go. “Basically, again, we turned a negative into a positive, and to his credit, Dev pulled off every section of the fight,” Chab said.
The final fight with Rana took two days to shoot in the penthouse, which had many mirrors and was difficult to shoot from certain angles. It was a no-holds-barred contest. “It was vicious,” Chab added.
